What is journey analysis?

Most of the time when we analyse data, we try and understand what people are doing at any one time.

For example, your financial reporting may look at how many people are donating and by how much, month by month or year by year.

Your impact reporting may look at how many people have used your service in the past.

But journey analysis takes your understanding of behaviours to the next level.

Understand more about your people

By thinking in terms of journeys, rather than just snapshots, you can start to understand more about the people you are interacting with and make decisions off the back of it. With journeys, you start to look at how people first interacted with you, what journey did they make, did it match up to your expectations? Are there common patterns or journeys that people are making and how can you change the way you interact with them improve their journey?

Analysing fundraising journeys

An example of this was some analysis of fundraising journeys with a small charity. We found that most people’s first interaction with the charity was through a website interaction, but a number of people also first engaged by coming to an event.

There were some commonalities among people who entered through the website interaction.

There were also some commonalities among people who started by coming to an event.

People entering through the website tended to do a one-off donation and then make more sporadic donations, prompted by mailing campaigns.

However, people entering through events tended to be more diverse, getting involved in volunteering opportunities and regularly donating. These insights helped the charity to make some strategic decisions. Should they focus more of their marketing efforts on events as although expensive, tended to bring in more dedicated donors?

How could you apply this?

Your donors stories may look very different to this but how could you start looking at journeys to understand more about your supporters? How could apply this to your impact data too?